Riding the Knobs

The workers who have been repairing the house next door to my apartment building were either absent or silent this morning, offering the hope that the mandatory 7am wake up calls I have enjoyed for the last several weeks may be subsiding. The rest of the year I am up well before 7 on work days anyway, but we have enjoyed a temporary reprieve from these early mornings during the holidays as long as I’ve had the job, working in the afternoon and early evening instead. Thus there is some cruel irony, not just inconvenience, in the noise next door appearing when it did. I do also have real jackhammers in the neighborhood, for bridge work scheduled to run into 2021. And of course there is the endless barrage of emergency vehicles, closing train doors, vehicles at work honking twice to announce their impending movements, etc. We use loud noises to get each other’s attention, ostensibly for safety purposes; but this is anything but safe for our ears. I have taken to wearing earplugs to bed and keeping them in all the way through my outbound commute. Is this really all that dangerous when I can still hear all of the warnings perfectly well?